SwiftVets.com

[shawa]

The War Against World War IV--Norman Podhoretz

A very long but very insightful and thought-provoking commentary
on the obstacles President Bush faces from the enemies of the Bush Doctrine.
I have printed it out to pass on to those who don't realize
how we can be defeated by forces in our own country.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/special/A11902025_1.html

"Thus the media continued to harp on the successes of Hanoi even after the North’s assault on South Vietnamese cities had been blunted; they spoke of rural areas having fallen under Communist control that were in fact being held by American and South Vietnamese forces; they said that the South Vietnamese troops in the provinces were refusing to fight when in fact they were refusing to cave in; and so forth and so on. To top it all off, when the American commander, General William Westmoreland, or President Lyndon Johnson, or any of their spokesmen tried to counter these false impressions, they were ridiculed for "singing the same old song" of progress and optimism that had already exposed them as a pack of liars.17

The same triumph of spin over reality is what the enemies of the Bush Doctrine will desperately try to achieve if (or when) Iraq proves to be a success. Of course, things are a little different now. In 1968, when Walter Cronkite, speaking in his characteristically solemn tones from the anchor chair of the CBS Evening News, endorsed the view that Tet had been a defeat for us, Johnson realized that there was nothing further he could do to counter this blatant falsehood, and that he himself was for all practical purposes finished. But with the rise of alternatives to the mainstream media like talk radio, Fox News, and the blogosphere, when in 2004 Cronkite’s successor, Dan Rather, tried to palm off a falsehood about George W. Bush, it was he and not Bush who was for all practical purposes finished.

Article at:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/special/A11902025_1.html

[AMOS]

IMHO, LBJ was "finished" before he started. The death of JFK was one of the worst things to ever happen to US forces in Vietnam.